Senior Designer, Design Systems at Niche

About Niche

Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.

Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.

About The Role

**We are currently recruiting for this role in Argentina and Brazil only.  We will not be considering US based candidates at this time.  All interviews are being held remotely. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.**

**Only applications/resumes written in English will be accepted.**

Every year, millions of families start the school search process. Students wade through a sea of information and decisions to make, and unfortunately access to help hasn’t changed much in decades: it’s not super clear what your options are, and you might not feel confident that a school is right for you, or think you’ll be able to afford it.

Niche is on a mission to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. Students need support choosing a school and paying for their education, schools want to find students who will thrive on their campus, and families need help supporting their students every step of the way. Niche helps ensure that it’s not just students already confident about college who get enrolled and can afford to attend.

As a Senior Designer of Design Systems at Niche, you will work closely with other designers and engineers to evolve Expedite, the system that powers our web and mobile experiences. Design is core to how we build trust with users and help students find where they belong. Our design system enables teams to ship high-quality, consistent experiences quickly, while maintaining a cohesive visual language, as well as accessibility compliance.

You will help shape the foundations, components, and patterns that product teams will rely on every day. Starting on day one, build your understanding of real product needs and then translate them into scalable solutions, ensuring that the system grows alongside the company. Your work will help unlock speed and quality for the Product org, giving Product Designers more bandwidth for defining problems and solutions, and supporting Engineering with building and shipping elegant product experiences.

This role is ideal for a builder who is eager for more ownership over a design system that needs vision and a lot of love. You will sit at the intersection of craft, systems thinking, collaboration, and visual excellence, with senior leadership support and guidance on delivering your vision to production. The Design team is so excited for this role to be open and can’t wait to work with you!

What You Will Do

• Define, evolve, and maintain Niche’s visual language and component library, including typography, color, iconography, and UI patterns
• Design and refine reusable components, tokens, and interaction patterns that enable teams to build consistent, high-quality experiences across web and mobile
• Introduce atomic design principles to our systems and guidelines
• Strong working fluency with modern front-end concepts (primitives, semantic and component level tokens, states, responsive behavior)
• Collaborate closely with engineering to ensure components translate cleanly from design to implementation, using your technical understanding to discuss tradeoffs
• Improve the contribution model so teams can effectively propose, build, and scale new components from real product use cases
• Develop clear documentation, guidelines, and tooling that helps teams adopt and use the design system with confidence
• Champion accessibility, usability, and design quality across the system
• Align with our brand guidelines to ensure we look and feel like Niche everywhere that users encounter us
• Support and guide product teams using the system through reviews, feedback, and collaborative problem solving
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve the system and drive improvements with a strong bias for action
• Act as an advocate for systems thinking and consistency across the design organization

During the First Month:

• Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings
• Meet and get familiar with your engineering partners, the designers you're supporting, and key stakeholders across the Product org
• Understand the company mission and vision, business model, and current state of the product
• Get familiar with our design system Expedite, design tooling, and how designs are defined and handed off to Engineering
• Shadow work in progress and perform a needs assessment with internal "customers" of Expedite to surface pain points and opportunities
• Begin shaping a vision and strategy for a new design system, grounded in unlocking speed through AI tooling while maintaining accessibility compliance

Within 3 Months:

• Finalize a vision and strategy for the evolution of Expedite, co-owned with Engineering
• Develop a roadmap informed by business priorities and product development timelines that sequences foundational work, component migrations, AI-assisted workflows, etc
• Align with Engineering on a shared execution plan, with clear ownership, milestones, and success metrics
• Ship prioritized components, tokens, and interaction patterns from the roadmap across web and mobile

Within 6 Months:

• Establish governance, a contribution model, and accessibility standards (WCAG AA) in partnership with senior leadership
• Partner with Engineering and Product Design to stand up AI-assisted design and design-to-code workflows (MCP servers, Storybook + code, automation, whatever you dream up) that cut handoff time and empower Product Design to own the design system more directly
• Bake accessibility compliance into the contribution process, so new components ship WCAG AA by default
• Drive early adoption across product teams and establish baseline metrics for design system health

Within 12 Months:

• Evangelize the adoption of our design system so that it drives the majority of web and mobile experiences, with measurable improvements in shipping speed and consistency
• Deliver mature AI-assisted design and design-to-code workflows that meaningfully reduce the time from idea to production for designers and engineers
• Maintain accessibility compliance across the system through design systems reviews for work in progress and/or automated checks that catch regressions before they ship
• Continue overseeing the maintenance and evolution of the design system

What We Are Looking For

• All applicants must submit a portfolio that showcases their work on design systems
• 6+ years of relevant experience, with a track record of helping set design system vision and strategy, driving adoption and measuring success
• Strong visual design and product thinking, with sharp attention to detail across component states, interaction patterns, visual consistency, and accessibility compliance (WCAG AA standards)
• Strong Figma proficiency, especially with auto layout, nesting, constraints, responsive layouts and components, variants, properties, etc – that being said, we want your help exploring a move toward Storybook + code and reducing our dependency on Figma
• Familiar with AI-assisted design workflows and design-to-code automation workflows, including MCP servers and similar tooling. Be ready to set up your own ec2 and get into code with us!
• Experience designing for both mobile and web platforms
• Experience collaborating with product management and engineering partners
• Ability to balance system scalability with real product needs, making thoughtful tradeoffs when required
• Strong communication skills and the ability to articulate design decisions
• Resilience and flexibility that helps you adapt to a fast-paced work environment, frequent changes, and considerable ambiguity

Interview Process

Candidate experience is a top priority for our talent and hiring teams.  We believe in providing a transparent, authentic and comprehensive interview process where you have the opportunity to learn about us while we get to know you and your experience.  The interview process is outlined here:

• Video Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner - 30 Minutes

• Video Interview with Hiring Manager - 45 Mins 

• Case Study Presentation - 60 Minutes

• Panel Interview- (Design) 30 min, (Engineering) 30 min

**We are currently recruiting for this role in Argentina and Brazil only.  We will not be considering US based candidates at this time.  All interviews are being held remotely. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.**

**Only applications/resumes written in English will be accepted.**